238 ORIENTALISM on the same page as his sneer at Orientalism: “The Semites are like to a man sitting in a cloaca to the eyes, and whose brows touch heaven.”*!) They acted, they promised, they recommended public policy on the basis of such generalizations; and, by a remarkable irony, they acquired the identity of White Orientals in their natal cultures—even as, in the instances of Doughty, Lawrence, Hogarth, and Bell, their professional involvement with the East (like Smith’s) did not prevent them from despising it thoroughly. The main issue for them was preserving the Orient and Islam under the control of the White Man. A new dialectic emerges out of this project. What is required of the Oriental expert is no longer simply “understanding“: now the Orient must be made to perform, its power must be enlisted on the side of “our” values, civilization, interests, goals. Knowledge of the Orient is directly translated into activity, and the results give rise to new currents of thought and action in the Orient. But these in turn will require from the White Man a new assertion of control, this time not as the author of a scholarly work on the Orient but as the maker of contemporary history, of the Orient as urgent actuality (which, because he began it, only the expert can understand adequately). The Orientalist has now become a figure of Oriental history, indistinguishable from it, its shaper, its characteristic sign for the West. Here is the dialectic in brief: Some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, believed that a rebellion of Arabs against Turks would enable England, while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat her ally Turkey. Their knowledge of the nature and power and country of the Arabicspeaking peoples made them think that the issue of such a rebellion would be happy: and indicated its character and method. So they allowed it to begin, having obtained formal assurances of help for it from the British Government. Yet none the less the rebellion of the Sherif of Mecca came to most as a Surprise, an¢ found the Allies unready. It aroused mixed feelings and made strong friends and enemies, amid whose clashing jcalousies its affairs began to miscarry.? This is Lawrence’s own synopsis of chapter 1 of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The “knowledge” of “some Englishmen” authors a movement in the Orient whose “affairs” create a mixed progeny; the ambiguities, the half-imagined, tragicomic results of this new, revived Orient become the subject of expert writing, a new form of Orientalist discourse that presents a vision of the contemporary

Orientalism Now 239 Orient, not as narrative, but as all complexity, problematics, betrayed hope—with the White Orientalist author as its prophetic, articulate definition. The defeat of narrative by vision—which is true even in so patently storylike a work as The Seven Pillars—is something we have already encountered in Lane’s Modern Egyptians. A conflict between a holistic view of the Orient (description, monumental record) and a narrative of events in the Orient is a conflict on several levels, involving several different issues. As the conflict is frequently renewed in the discourse of Orientalism, it is worthwhile analyzing it here briefly. The Orientalist surveys the Orient from above, with the aim of getting hold of the whole sprawling panorama before him—culture, religion, mind, history, society. To do this he must see every detail through the device of a set of reductive categories (the Semites, the Muslim mind, the Orient, and so forth). Since these categories are primarily schematic and efficient ones, and since it is more or less assumed that no Oriental can know himself the way an Orientalist can, any vision of the Orient ultimately comes to rely for its coherence and force on the person, institution, or discourse whose property it is. Any comprehensive vision is fundamentally conservative, and we have noted how in the history of ideas about the Near Orient in the West these ideas have maintained themselves regardless of any evidence disputing them. (Indeed, we can argue that these ideas produce evidence that proves their validity. ) The Orientalist is principally a kind of agent of such comprehensive visions; Lane is a typical instance of the way an individual believes himself to have subordinated his ideas, or even what he sees, to the exigencies of some “scientific” view of the whole phenomenon known collectively as the Orient, or the Oriental nation. A vision therefore is static, just as the scientific categories informing latenineteenth-century Orientalism are static: there is no recourse beyond “the Semites” or “the Oriental mind”; these are final tertninals holding every variety of Oriental behavior within a general view of the whole field. As a discipline, as a profession, as specialized language or discourse, Orientalism is staked upon the permanence of the whole Orient. for without “the Orient” there can be no consistent, intelligible, and articulated knowledge called “Orientalism.” Thus the Orient belongs to Orientalism, just as it is assumed that there is pertinent informnation belonging to (or about) the Orient.